The human condition is gone, there is no longer community. It's becoming too digitized. It went from that to utter chaos in no time. That's a huge part of humanity.

Those are the results of using negative social propaganda from decades worth of prime conditioning. And it's getting faster all the time. Qualifying and quantifying everything for maximum consumptive value. Normalizing time values in the digital realm over the natural.

This articles purpose is real and to hopefully might inspire somebody with the time and resources to do something about it.

Open-source code is embedded throughout all software. And since it interacts with other code and is constantly changing, it is not a set-it-and-forget-it deal. No software is static.

Last year we saw the consequences from this when a 28-year-old developer briefly “broke“ the internet because he deleted open-source code that he had made available. The drama occurred because the developer’s program shared a name with Kik, the popular Canadian messaging app, and there was a trademark dispute. The rest of the story is complicated but has an important takeaway: Our digital infrastructure is very fragile.

There are people so important to maintaining code that the internet would break if they were hit by a bus. (Computer security folks literally call this the “bus factor.”) These people are well-meaning but tired and underfunded. And I haven’t even gotten to the fact that hard-to-maintain code is precisely where security vulnerabilities reside (just ask Ukraine).

All this makes Y2K look like a picnic, especially since the magnitude of these issues is unknown. Individual companies have no idea how vulnerable they might be. And it may be slow-moving — systems slowly being corrupted without causing crashes that are visible. Finally, since open-source platforms have been built by a community that has relished its independence, the problems won’t be easy to fix using traditional commercial or governmental approaches.

There are pioneers who are working on the problem. Open Collective is providing resources to aggregate the needs of groups of open-source projects to assist in the financing, resourcing, and maintenance. Another organization, libraries.io, is doing a heroic job of indexing projects, including much-needed documentation and a map of relationships between projects. But none of these have support from the businesses most vulnerable to the issues.

When Y2K emerged, publicly listed companies were told to catalog their vulnerabilities and plans. The time has come again for markets (and perhaps regulators) to demand similar audits as a first step toward working out the magnitude of the problem. And maybe — just maybe — those corporations will find a way to support the infrastructure they are depending on, rather than taking it blindly as some unacknowledged gift. Every day is now Y2K.